Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture

"Plumbers mediate between the pure and the abject. They order everyday fluids, they manage flow, they straighten things out and keep things clean. Sounding depths, righting columns, fixing pipes: plumbing leads to the bottom of things." --from the introduction to Plumbing

One of the fundamental tenets of modernism was its image of hygiene, its ideal of bringing cleanliness and order to the great unwashed, as evident in Adolf Loos's 1898 article, "Plumbers." Using Loos as a point of departure, the essays in this collection examine architecture through the multiple meanings inherent in plumbing--from the pipes of modern hygiene, to the plumb line of the right angle, to Marcel Duchamp's Ready-made urinal.

Essay titles include "Siegfried Giedion and the Fascination of the Tub," "The Pneumatic Bathroom," "Bathrooms and Kitchens: Cleaning House with Duchamp," "Architects' Bellies: The Plumbing of Masculine Conceptions," and, of course, Loos's "Plumbers." Among the contributors are Victor Burgin, Xavier Costa, Marco Frascari, Harry Francis Mallgrave, and Helen Molesworth.